


My Heart Is A Snaking Vine

by Hukkelberg



Category: Tam Lin (Traditional Ballad), 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS
Genre: (in general not jinkook), Abuse, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Anachronistic, Ballad 39: Tam Lin, Fae & Fairies, Fairy Kim Seokjin | Jin, Fairy Tale Retellings, Familiars, For the laws of Carterhaugh and Court, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, M/M, Marriage of Convenience, Minor Violence, Non-Linear Narrative, Please read the notes for further clarification!, Sexual Tension, Terrible Gross Men, Written in two tenses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-18 04:49:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16111154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hukkelberg/pseuds/Hukkelberg
Summary: “With what right, pray tell, do you harm the flowers so?” came the voice from behind the rosebush. “This is not a land of yours to steal from.”Jungkook whirled around to see a man stepping out, too beautiful to be anything but a dream. His hair was the same soft pink of the flower he had plucked for Yerim and his eyes were sharp as the edge of the sword Jungkook carried at his belt. The morning light fell on his face mimicking the shimmer of dew on the rose petals and his plump lips stretched around the words he spewed in a way that ought to have been ugly but was nothing short of spectacular. Yerim’s jaw set tight, posture rigid, but Jungkook couldn’t draw his eyes away.There he was: the legend of old.He spared Jungkook not a glance.





	My Heart Is A Snaking Vine

**Author's Note:**

> let me explain how this story works:
> 
> (you'd think one shouldn't have to)
> 
> this is a retelling of the ballad of tam lin, specifically [child ballad 39a](http://www.tam-lin.org/versions/39A.html), in which seokjin is tam lin, choerry is janet and jungkook is janet's (previously non-existent) brother, because i didn't want to supplant a woman's role in a story i believe has a lot to do with a woman's strength/agency. though the focus of this fic is seokjin and jungkook's relationship, everything (mostly) happens as it does in the ballad and is constantly referenced throughout. (i actually do have a version of the main story scribbled out! but it's mostly chaerrim...)
> 
> for a brief summary of the story, carterhaugh is haunted by the fae tam lin, who collects trinkets or maidenhoods to account for trespassing. janet enters carterhaugh, as the land is technically hers, and gives her maidenhood to tam lin. they fall in love and she gets pregnant, comes back home and taunts her father's knights when they attempt to shame her. when she returns to tam lin's side, he tells her he's about to be sent to hell and she has to save him so the very next night, she goes to where the faerie queen's entourage will pass by and pulls him from his horse. he turns in her arms into a ton of horrible beasts and lastly into a hot iron rod, she throws him to the well and he turns human again. the faerie queen is mad af and curses at them but they presumably live happily ever after.
> 
> now, as for how this fic should be read, i personally feel like you should read it in the order it is laid out in but since the narrative is non-linear and can be confusing, i labelled them in linear order so you can read from i to xviii if you want. what is written in past tense corresponds to the timeline of the original ballad and what is written in present tense corresponds to what happens afterwards. there's large (or short) gaps of time between each scene, though, and not everything that happens is on there (not in this _fic_ at least).
> 
> [THIS HAS A PLAYLIST!](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1IKJ0ZBGwNuJUjQfNesscc) (pls listen to it this rlly has my blood sweat n tears) 
> 
> i hope you like it!
> 
>  
> 
> WARNINGS TO LOOK OUT FOR:  
> 
> 
>   1. **abuse/domestic violence** : jungkook gets hit by his father, hard enough to draw blood, and it is implied this is not the first time it has happened. you can skip the entirety of point two (ii) to avoid reading about it, just know that he basically sends him out to bring seokjin in because yerim is pregnant.
>   2. **implied/referenced dub con** : unfortunately, this is heavily implied all throughout the fic so I can't tell you where exactly to avoid it, but it doesn't involve the main character's relationship at all. the magic surrounding carterhaugh (having to ask for maidenhoods) written into fairy law is what implies dub con most heavily, particularly the fact that sometimes the queen forces seokjin to ask for them instead of something else (and watches). it never happens on screen, though.
>   3. **general gross men** : the knights working for jk's father are just generally gross men. they joke in lewd, objectifying ways, specifically in point two and point seventeen, though i wouldn't recommend skipping that last one.
>   4. also, in case you are wondering, everybody is aged up in this fic, though not by much. enough for it to be legal, at least, though i was never thinking any specific age. just to clarify bc yerim does have a baby at the beginning.
> 


 

 

 

He looks at me and  
I want more.

My heart is a snaking vine.  
And god,

I want _more_.

        — Karese Burrows, from “He,” _This Is How We Lost Each Other_

 

 

 **viii**.

The sun gleamed down the clearing at Carterhaugh, blocked only by the canopy of trees and the arching of the rosebush that rose above the grass. They curled up around each other, like joined hands sheltering him from the rest of the world. Jungkook was there, for the first time. He was alone too.

Except he wasn’t really alone, was he? And he had come precisely because he knew that setting foot in Carterhaugh would bring him company. The blood on his fingers had dried already and he still held in his hands the thorny rose he had plucked from the top of the wall.

“Why are you here?” asked Seokjin, coming to sit in front to him. His hair was black and it glinted off the sunlight.

“I wanted to see you,” Jungkook answered honestly.

“There’s a price to pay at Carterhaugh for taking something that’s not yours,” Seokjin warned.

Jungkook tilted his head. “Are you talking about the rose or about you?”

Seokjin smiled, small and unknowable. His eyes shone. “Have you brought me a ring?”

Jungkook’s fingers were bare. He had taken all his jewellery off at home. Seokjin’s smile grew wider and slowly, ever so slowly, he laid Jungkook on the grass, crawling above him. His lips tasted like the cherry wine they had had at dinner, ripened from the trees Yerim had planted last summer at the back of the orchard.

His hands roamed over Jungkook’s body and he took and he took and he took.

 

 **x**.

Yerim has the baby just as the Woods begin to thaw outside Oakwood tower.

It’s plump and rosy and its ears are beautifully round. It cries a lot, weeps hours into the night, and Yerim carries with her obscure marks of weariness under her eyes, but it doesn’t seem to matter a lot when she raises it in its arms, and it drinks off the moonlight by the window. It’s a fae babe, it’s what it is. Jungkook knows that well. It looks all of a human being but when he picks it up, sits down by the candlelight so his sister may get some rest, its eyes glint all too intelligently for something quite so small. Yerim gathers her skirts and climbs atop the bed and the figure buried between the covers sneaks an arm around her waist and grips her tight, tight. The baby scrunches up its nose up at Jungkook.

Jungkook loves it very much.

Not everyone does.

 

**i.**

“You mustn’t go so far!” Jungkook yelled out, trudging into the woods. Yerim’s green mantle lost itself among the trees but the white of her skirts flapped in the wind and gave her away regardless. Her bright laughter was also a poor employee in the venture of hiding her. “You will get lost and I’ll have to drag you through the bushes!”

“Stop being a bore!” shouted Yerim back. “We’re right at Carterhaugh! The roses are just a way ahead!”

Just shy of Ettrick Water, there used to be a couple houses built out of stone, now given back entirely to the realm of nature. Jungkook followed Yerim as she hopped past their derelict structures, web coves and growing vines creeping up whatever was still standing, into the clearings at Carterhaugh. The grass was nicely grown, wild at first sight but with enough restraint to know where its end lay, and it glinted off the sunlight whenever the wind picked up and ruffled the blades. Jungkook was so enthralled in its dancing that he didn’t realize his foot had gotten stuck on the root of a rather big elm nearby and he almost dived into the grass trying to walk forward. It doesn’t do to stay still for so long, silly, Yerim laughed at him. The woods would eat all that he would let them.

She made her rounds about the clearings, just as Jungkook sat atop a rock, minding the ants crawling around his ankles and the ever-growing energy of their whereabouts. They had been warned not to go down to Carterhaugh, tales of stolen knights and silly maidens, but Yerim listened to no voice but that of the heavens and they rarely spoke to either of them directly. So she had dragged him down there in search of a wall of roses, which she had seen from the far extreme of her window, and from which she would draw inspiration to sew Father a nicer pillow to keep under his knees.

“There it is! Brother, come look!”

Interrupted thoughts of venison for dinner and the cherries that their newly planted tree would bring, Jungkook made his way to the wall of flowers Yerim had finally located. When she had first spotted it, hidden just before the edge where all earth became a blur, Jungkook had watched her open the glass doors and hang off the balcony until she saw with certainty that which she wished to see. Alongside a well, the roses grew over a dilapidated wall of what he thought must’ve been a great stable or rather a church, and not very far was the same patch of chalk-covered earth they had crossed on the other side, just before the grass started. Jungkook wondered if it was like that all around the clearing but he hadn’t time to check.

“Aren’t they so darling?” Yerim asked, reaching out for the biggest one, hanging right above her head. She couldn’t quite get to it.

Jungkook smiled. “Is it the one at the top you want?”

“Yes, please,” she asked sweetly, hands joined.

Jungkook plucked one single rose, from the top of the rosebush, and handed it down to Yerim. It was the pinkest of roses he had yet seen and its petals were still covered from that morning’s dew so that it gleamed soft and pale against the light when she twirled it in her delicate fingers. He watched for the thorns not to prickle at her skin, for she did that enough with her needle, but Yerim just beamed down at the rose.

“With what right, pray tell, do you harm the flowers so?” came the voice from behind the rosebush. “This is not a land of yours to steal from.”

Jungkook whirled around to see a man stepping out, too beautiful to be anything but a dream. His hair was the same soft pink of the flower he had plucked for Yerim and his eyes were sharp as the edge of the sword Jungkook carried at his belt. The morning light fell on his face mimicking the shimmer of dew on the rose’s petals and his plump lips stretched around the words he spewed in a way that ought to have been ugly but was nothing short of spectacular. Yerim’s jaw set tight, her posture rigid, but Jungkook couldn’t draw his eyes away.

There he was: the legend of old.

He spared Jungkook not a glance.

 

 **xi**.

Seokjin sits all the way at the end of the table. It annoys Father and it draws the guests’ attention as he leans down to whisper at Jungkook’s ear. Jungkook’s been tasked to watch him for the night, as he’s always been since they rescued him. Seokjin’s hand splays on his thigh for support when he leans, well under the table, and Jungkook braces. Yerim is on the ladies’ room, with the babe, playing card games.

“Say, have you ever been a deer before?”

Seokjin’s lips are close enough to tickle, close enough to remember later how they feel whispering in his ear. Jungkook gulps and feels the smirk growing at the side of his face. When he pulls away, the façade of boredom Seokjin had kept is up just for those who still glance at him but he allows Jungkook to see the glimmer of his eyes, the pull of his smile dancing.

“Not all of us have been foolish enough to be made into something we are not,” Jungkook replies curtly.

Seokjin hums, taps the fingers he’s got on Jungkook’s thigh absentmindedly. They’re still there, aren’t they? How could he forget, for one second, how could he forget. Especially as they dig at the skin, too close for comfort, nails too sharp not to have the memory of the beast under the bridge nestled in his sister’s arms come rushing into his head. He’s tempted to look down, see for himself, but he knows it would be a mistake.

“They are just so very large, aren’t they,” Seokjin says and Jungkook has the certainty that, were they to be left alone, Seokjin would’ve raised a hand to grab his face. It’s just the image that strikes him. “Your eyes. I have only seen them in a certain doe.”

Jungkook bristles away from him, as though the grip Seokjin’s got on him is nothing more than imaginary, not a chain for the strength of his will. “I dislike the comparison,” he huffs out and he hates how every time Seokjin smiles at him, it _dances_ on his face. “It isn’t _my_ eyes you should be looking at.”

Seokjin’s eyes harden and a nail digs into the fabric covering Jungkook’s thigh. Were it sharper, it would’ve pierced through, it would’ve drawn blood. But all were human in this room, Jungkook reminds himself, even when his veins pick up the pace and his gut stirs inside him. “I think you will find,” Seokjin whispers down at him, forever beautiful, forever enchanting, “that I will do as I please.”

 

 **ii**.

“You have allowed her descent into the woods and now disgrace has fallen upon us!” Father bellowed, a heavy set man with small eyes and a face that got too red when he was angry.

Jungkook was still reeling from the slap, skin burning too hot. The knights and gentlemen had all left the house or scattered to their rooms upstairs, so they wouldn’t be a bother when the time came for him to be punished. Yerim, too, was upstairs, unaware of what was happening to him or else she would be on their father on a second, trying uselessly to protect him. But she didn’t, Jungkook had seen to it.

 _I will give your child a name_ , the men had said, thrusting out their grubby hands. _My child’s name is already my own_ , she’d said, looking up at Father’s kind smile. As their evening progressed, Jungkook had had known well that below his father’s hearty laughter rested the shame of having his only daughter prance around with a nameless child growing inside her. It would weigh on Jungkook, and no one else, Father’s shame growing even deeper after Yerim snapped smartly at the jeering men who gathered around her by the fireplace. But he couldn’t blame his sister for being herself nor would he dare dream of caging her.

“You truly have no knowledge as to who it might have been?” Father whirled around, irate. He looked like the mountain gorilla from the book Namjoon had lent him last Easter, deep frown set harshly on his face and broad shoulder held down by the weight of the years, not that such a fact would have been a wise thing to mention in his circumstances. His father raised a fist to the ceiling and Jungkook tried not to squirm, guard up. “By the heavens, if I have that wretched creature sleeping under my own roof! I will drag the man by the toes and hang him from the cherry tree!”

All Jungkook could think of was rose blonde hair ripping off the sun among the dancing trees and Yerim’s laughter twinkling alongside the roses. “She has told you herself,” he said again, as calmly as possible.

“Do you expect me to believe she has been _blessed_ by a _fae,_ of all things?” Father spat. His anger only made Jungkook grow more distant in his appraisal. This was a number he had gone through countless times before. The numbness in his mouth was beginning to fade away and that was a much better thing to focus on. “I would sooner believe she had lain with a bear! Do you think me so dim-witted?”

“You have heard the locals speak of it as well,” he retorted, letting his hand drop to the side. “It haunts the well at Carterhaugh and ask for mantles, rings or maidenhoods—“

Father scoffed. “And you have allowed it take your sister’s?”

“I do not live to procure her every step!” Jungkook snapped angrily and there it was again, the impact. This time it had broken skin, he could feel the copper dripping to his tongue.

The fireplace and his father’s heaving were the only sounds that filled the air in the aftermath of the abuse. It must’ve been the ring, with the crest of their own house lavishly adorned in silver, Jungkook thought, which drew the blood. He drew himself straight, letting the wound drip into the white of his shirt because the maids had warned not to wipe a wound on a filthy sleeve. His bitterness was growing despite himself. Must he pay for that creature’s sins as well? Carterhaugh was a wretched land.

“Find the man or fae or whatever story you wish to tell yourself, and have him come forward to take responsibility for his actions. We must have your sister married before the creature is out and town gets word of it.” Father turned his back to him, munching on his own bitterness by the dwindling light of the fireplace. “Curse the moment I gave the two of you into this world for you’ve only brought me despair.”

 

**xiii.**

Young Haseul is not scared of the Fae and she isn’t scared of the babe but she recoils from the dark and the flap of pigeons’ wings. She’s the only one that will address the nature of the castle’s changes, that will help Jungkook change the babe’s rags into clean ones, and especially so, the only one that will allow Seokjin to trail behind her in the kitchens, unafraid of the poison and the abduction that everybody else seems to expect from the tall and beautiful man.

“It is because I am blind,” she says, “and you cannot make a fool of a strong woman.”

Jungkook thinks that is a lie. Everybody can be made a fool, especially by eyes like those.

Seokjin peels potatoes with Haseul, straddling the bench as though it was a precious mount. Old habits die hard. Neither knows he’s behind the askew door, peering into the small opening they’ve left. He had come to bring a plate and take upstairs a glass of water. It is the middle of the night and the moonlight showers on Seokjin from the skylight up above. He is still too ethereal to be convincingly human, and perhaps that is why everyone remains afraid. Jungkook has the certainty the threat of his beauty is not a product from his standstill time with the fae, but an inherent quality of his person.

“It must’ve been lonely,” Haseul says, continuing a conversation Jungkook didn’t catch. “All up there with no leave.”

“Freedom is a most cherished gift,” Seokjin says only. Why, his voice has a tilt too light for its nonchalance to be anything but constructed. He’s careful that way, Jungkook’s come to appreciate. It shows when he takes over talks of the estate and his father’s possessions, gaze growing cold or charming depending on the souls of the men he speaks with. He has a talent for that, too, soul-searching.

Haseul’s adept fingers thumb at the back of the knife and then she sinks it on the potato she is holding. “Is that what you most desired?”

Seokjin hums. “Quite. They would’ve taken me into hell as tithe—the doors were awfully gaudy and it smelled too sour for me to be comfortable.”

“I did not ask what you were most afraid of, though,” Haseul calls out with a small smile, amused. “But that which you desired most in your captivity. They are different questions.”

Fragility envelops Seokjin like a secret, falls on his shoulders as a cape of silken thread would. Jungkook wonders if a spider ever knitted him a mantle, or if the bees ever fed him off their sweet. It doesn’t seem out of place to imagine him inside a bubble, in careful examination of a growing flower, with the same saddened eyes and the downward tilt to his smile, nor does it seem strange to think that the Queen would enjoy that very same image. His hair would be wet with the morning dew and his ears would buzz with the birdsongs and yet, he thinks, as idyllic a picture it might be, all wild creatures weaned on fresh air and the large expanse of a free world find it very, very sad to see themselves in captivity.

Seokjin tells Haseul that Carterhaugh was not always his to guard, but that it was the farthest they would let him go. And then he caught his first maiden, a young child who exchanged a ring and a kiss on the cheek for a dozen roses to take to her mother, and he had pleaded to the Faerie Queen to let him contribute to the yearly bounty, as he could not reap and he couldn’t sow and she had Chuu to sing her to sleep. He mostly took rings and thimbles and all sorts of trinkets to fill up the Queen’s vaults, but there were times she visited, and those were the worst of them all, sat around the faerie ring and made him ask for maidenhoods instead. She would collect the babies afterwards, and Seokjin would pass them by around the Citadel, all grown up. When she liked a maiden, she took them as well. That’s how Chaewon had ended up in her court.

The door creaks when Jungkook’s foot nudges at it accidentally, too loudly to pass unnoticed. He waits with bated breath the moment they both call him out of his hiding spot but Seokjin keeps talking, not a lull in the conversation until moments later. He expounds on the delicacies of the faerie world to see Haseul smile, to prompt her to recreate a cake made with foxglove petals and willow nectar.

“Freedom is my final answer, I think. To escape the chains of _her_ command was the biggest of motivators, but above all, I wanted something of my own,” Seokjin says, and he looks up, straight on, meeting Jungkook’s eyes. The sweat sticking at the back of Jungkook’s neck runs cold under the weight of his words. “I wanted to hold onto somebody, to have something to sink my teeth into, of my own volition.”

 

 **iii**.

The woods were different at night. They were almost another realm entirely. In the shroud of the trees, hidden from the stars, Jungkook believed in his sister’s stories. The faerie court must be among them, somewhere, riding around in their wild horses and frocked in lavish gowns woven out of equal parts rosebuds and weeds. In the distance, he could hear the bells and the flutes, soft sounds carried by the wind to the lost recesses of the faerie kingdom. According to Namjoon, there was a full moon festival going on.

He stood right in front of the well, made of stones discretely stacked up on one another just a few paces from the rosebushes. There ought to be a marking, Jungkook thought, that announced _HERE LIES DANGER FROM OUTSIDE THE KNOWN WORLD._   Yerim had left the clearing an hour ago but he had stayed hidden among the trees in case she ought to return for something. She had given the faerie a lavish ring with their house’s crest on it as they lay down among the daisies, bathing in moonlight and drinking of conversation. He had not caught anything else after his sister’s departure but the creature submerging itself into the silver water of the well.

Yes, a plaque would do well. He would make sure to put it there, as prevention for the future virtuous ladies, after it was all over. Jungkook’s hand hovered over the pommel of his sword and his heart thrummed in his ears. He was afraid. He couldn’t help but be. Yet Father had said to do _something_ , a warning tacked at the end, and Jungkook could not find any way out other than this, not after the faerie had advised Yerim not to drink the pennyroyal tea the castle ladies had been offering her. Jungkook wouldn’t oppose it; he didn’t want the babe to die either.

He had visited town earlier in the morning. Above the ribbon shop laid the apothecary and there lived the eldest lady Jungkook had ever laid eyes on. She had been there forever, the maids had whispered at him when he asked, and the rumours said she had been taken by the fae when she was a child and that’s why she took so long to age out of this world. She did her job too well for any superstitious claims to threaten her, they assured Jungkook. That’s where they had taken the pennyroyal mix from.

A bell had chimed when he had entered the store and he wouldn’t have been able to locate it even if he had been interested in trying. Off the ceiling hanged bundles of dried plants, from wild things ripped from the earth’s intestines to gentle sprigs the people harvested to eat. No place was left unoccupied, boxes upon boxes littering the corners, glasses and jars stacked up on them, except for a single chair at the end of a table that served as a counter. Dodging the hanging creatures by the door, there was where Jungkook chose to sit. The apothecary, looking every year as old as rumoured, was sitting on the other end, threading close a stuffed frog.

The lady went by Mrs. Do and she refused to tell Jungkook her forename. “Names hold power, child,” she’d spat out and left it at that. She told Jungkook of the well that had been there for years and years on end, and of the faerie that haunted it, who had only been a fixture for a little less. “I have heard of the situation,” she commented when Jungkook spoke of the mission he had. His ears had burned bright red for nothing bode well if they had news of Yerim’s pregnancy already.

“Then you must know how desperately I need your guidance,” he pleaded.

The apothecary scrunched her nose. “You ought to be hanged for these thoughts.”

“Perhaps, but that can be discussed after I return with him,” Jungkook said. “Please.”

“ _If_ you return,” she corrected sharply. Jungkook couldn’t forget that, she made sure to let him know.

“I _will_ ,” he insisted fiercely, palms pressing onto the wood of the table. Mrs. Do regarded him calmly from the other side, among the sprigs of wheat hanging over her head. “If only you would assist me.”

She seemed to consider him a long time, and Jungkook tried not to yield under the piercing glare, but whatever she was looking for she must’ve found, for she blinked very slowly and then sighed in resignation. “Very well,” she said, standing up. Her bones creaked as she walked towards the back door and rang the tiny bell that Jungkook had not noticed hung over a barrel and a stack of jars with different animal bits stored in strangely coloured concoctions. Immediately, there was a thump outside and heavy steps trudged up the stairs. Out of breath, a tall girl dragging her muddied hem burst through the door, almost knocking the immutable lady. Her eyes snapped from Jungkook to Mrs. Do in confusion, regarding him sharply, but Mrs. Do only waved a hand. Her expression was a morose as it had ever been. “I cannot aid a fool myself, but my apprentice shall provide for you what you require. Have at it, Soul.”

That was how Jungkook had arrived to the well, sheathed sword strapped to his belt, a vial of char, incense and crushed bitterroot and wet hemlock petals mixed in, gripping a scrap of paper where Jinsoul had scribbled him a spell to recite. She had already tied a cord around his wrist to keep him grounded, and he would have to tie it into the faerie to drag him out the clearing successfully. Jungkook uncapped the vial and slathered the heel of his shoes with the powder, imagining a weight settling upon it as he muttered the words Jinsoul had drilled into him. The dirt beneath his soles gleamed gold for a split second, as she had instructed him it would if he followed her instructions, and then Jungkook was pocketing the scrap of paper into his pouch and walking towards the undisturbed water.

“The lengths to which I go to keep you safe astound me, sister,” Jungkook muttered and plunged his hand into the well.

Nothing happened for a while. The water seemed to go on forever and Jungkook was already elbow deep in it. Would he not come out? Was he this capricious? What would Jungkook do if the faerie had left his outpost? The sleeves of his tunic were sliding down and getting caught in the water even when he had hiked them up at the beginning. The wool would soon get heavy and Jungkook was getting restless.

But then a hand clasped his under the water and he pulled up hastily the weight of the man underneath until the faerie was breathing out into the moonlight. Pink hair perfectly dried swept over his eyes, a deep black that peered into Jungkook’s own eyes with initial confusion and then distress. “You are not Yerim,” he pointed out, dazed.

“Smart,” Jungkook replied and pulled him out a little more, until the man was leaning over the edge on his elbows. “You will accompany me now.”

The faerie looked him over. “Already making demands,” he snorted. “You must be her brother.”

He had said it as though it was the first time he ever laid eyes upon him. The fact made a hot, acid feeling set on the bottom of Jungkook’s stomach and he gripped tighter. “That I am, and you will ride with me towards our home and take responsibility for what you have done.”

The faerie’s eyes hardened. “Responsibility? Who speaks of such a thing?” he said in a tone full of derision. “I am not the one who tried to lure an innocent girl into certain death, for herself and the child she carried.”

“Yet you had no qualms luring her somewhere else, didn’t you?” Jungkook seethed.

The faerie regarded him with cold eyes, unimpressed. It only made Jungkook feel smaller, angrier. “You don’t know a single thing, do you,” he drawled out, plump lips curling ugly. Something stirred in Jungkook’s stomach, different now from what he had felt before. Colder, maybe. “Go away, child. I don’t have much time now.”

But when the faerie tried to leave, hop back into the well, he couldn’t move. His eyes flickered between their hands, where Jungkook had tied the cord to his pinky without him realizing. The red twine held him in his place and Jungkook felt a rush of pride when the faerie looked back at him, dumbfounded.

“Release me this instant,” he warned, voice suddenly low. Jungkook pretended it didn’t send a chill down his spine. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Stop trying to confuse me!” Jungkook gripped the other’s wrist so tight it cut red into the white skin. “You’re coming with me whether you want it or not!”

Something bright and ugly flashed through the faerie’s eyes and he leaned forward, coming awfully close to Jungkook’s face. “No, I rather think it is _you_ who is coming with _me_ ,” he snarled back and plunged Jungkook into the darkness of the endless water.

 

 **xii**.

“Am I dreaming?”

“I don’t know,” says Seokjin, circling a finger over Jungkook’s knee. “Do you dream of me often?”

 _All of the time_ , Jungkook thinks. _And it always feels so very awful._

There are torrents of light showering the room, filtered only by the white curtains flowing out of balconies made of woven wood. It isn’t Jungkook’s room. It isn’t anywhere he knows. He must be dreaming, then, he must be. Seokjin’s hand wouldn’t be pulling at his tunic, slipping under his shirt, splaying his fingers over the taut skin of Jungkook’s stomach otherwise. Of course it must be a dream.

“Like this?” Seokjin mouths at Jungkook’s nape and his breath hitches in his throat. “Do you dream of me like this?”

 _All of the time_ , Jungkook thinks. _And it always feels so very good._

 

 **iv**.

Jungkook’s throat throbbed when he woke, dry as a desert. He lied on a cool and soft bed made out of moss in a large room that seemed to have been carved out of the insides of a tree. There were fireflies woven into a string above the bedposts, big windows that let showers of moonlight shine in, framed by curtains of silken petals, and most surfaces were littered with small knickknacks that Jungkook was not sure were alive or not.

At the end of a long table sat a girl with long blonde hair cutting pineapple to eat. She had a black cat in her lap and was humming a very old song, a nursery rhyme he had only heard of the grandmother who peeled the onions at Oakwood tower. Jungkook rustled the sheets as he sat up and she snapped her head up, looking for the sound. The butterflies that adorned her hair flapped their wings startled but she smiled broadly at him, seemingly unconcerned.

She put the cat down and Jungkook watched it stretch, boneless. It stared back at him with clever yellow eyes and a little bit of judgement. “Don’t mind her,” the girl said, gathering her skirts and making her way towards him. Her dress was long enough that its hem should’ve been muddied up in the soil underneath her feet but it remained a spotless white. “She is just unaccustomed to strangers.  I’m glad you’re awake. My name is Go Won.”

Jungkook opened his mouth to reply but no sound came out. Go Won’s eyebrows knitted in concern until something seemed to dawn on her and she turned on her heel, sauntering across the room. He couldn’t tell what that corner of the room was exactly but it reminded him of the apothecary he had visited earlier, with pretty flowers hanging to dry and jars upon jars filled with strange things. Go Won soon returned, holding a mug in her small hands. She offered to him with a smile. Inside was a sunflower unfurling in a warm, honey-coloured liquid that tasted bittersweet but quenched his thirst almost immediately.

“Oh, good,” a voice said and behind a large bookcase, that he now understood was a door, emerged the faerie who had captured his sister’s heart. He wore white to match Gowon’s and he looked dashing under the clear window light. “I was afraid you’d sleep another thirteen years.”

Jungkook’s heart stopped in his ribcage, dread filling his lungs cold. “Thirteen years?” he asked, but the faerie smirked as he poured himself a drink and he knew it to be pure trickery.

Go Won swatted at him. “Don’t tease, Tam Lin. I have already given him the honeydew.”

“You?” The faerie looked up, surprised. “How did you brew it?”

“I didn’t. Hyunjin did,” she grinned, pointing at the cat. It blinked up at the faerie with the same absence of complex emotion it had stared at Jungkook earlier. Jungkook felt it was impolite to point out the obviousness of her lie when she had been nothing but kind to him so he kept quiet. Something about little sisters fooling around.

“Fine,” Tam Lin said, putting down the pitcher he had in his hands. He swept his eyes over Jungkook, picking him apart in such a careful, detached way, as though he was little more than a toy, only a problem, that it made the same hot, acid feeling he had felt earlier return to rest at the bottom of Jungkook’s stomach, annoyance flaring at him. The prognostic didn’t bode well for him, judging by the wry look on Tam Lin’s face. There was a spot in the sleeve of his tunic that hadn’t dried entirely and the two shades of green stuck out in between the pristine peach sheets they had wrapped him in. Tam Lin turned towards the girl and his eyes softened. “Dress him for me, will you? I should have some clothes hanging in the wardrobe that he can wear.”

“But brother, your clothes…” she said, eyeing a small tree expertly shaped into a box that Jungkook presumed was a wardrobe. She munched on her lip and when she spoke again, her tone was low, but Jungkook was much too close still not to catch it. “Won’t she notice?”

“Leave the worrying to me,” he said, and in an uncannily sweet gesture, leaned down to press a soft kiss to the crown of Go Won’s hair. Then he smiled haughtily, “besides, I will be there. Who would look at him when I am in the room?”

“You’ll have to forgive him,” Go Won said once he had left. “He does mean it, but not unkindly.”

“Didn’t seem very kind to me,” Jungkook muttered anyway and Go Won smiled the very same smile she had at the beginning. He could now pinpoint its nature: appeasing. Diplomatic, yet unaccustomed to drawing attention.

“He is tired, is all,” she muttered. “Passions run high at times like these, after all.”

He watched as she ran her hands over the tree, door opening at the click of hidden clasps, and pulled a few long garments, all black. The cat had jumped onto bed and was pushing its head against Jungkook’s ankles. “Why,” he asked, petting the space between Hyunjin’s ears, “must we dress up anyway?”

The cat scoffed, wet nose buffing air against his palm.

“It’s last supper,” Go Won answered. Her voice echoed from under the wardrobe, chiming like a bell in the vibration of the space. She was dragging a pair of boots for him to wear, of a muted gold that made Jungkook suspicious and afraid. Her gown was still impeccable despite having been kneeling in the dirt of the floor. “We will start trooping tomorrow, as is custom. But tonight we dine with the Queen.”

 

 **xvi**.

Jungkook feels the fur of a cat’s tail wrapping around his ankles and mistakes it for the wind flapping at his cloak until it jumps onto the railing of the balcony, startling him. It’s a tabby, the one that Yerim likes the most because it’s missing a chunk of its right ear and she thinks it makes it charming. She’s like that, she’s always been, a saviour of the lesser. He scoops it up in his arms and continues staring into the expanse of their grounds. The carriage has long since disappeared from the main road but Jungkook deludes himself into thinking the dust hasn’t yet settled, so that he may remain outside.

“Hello, Hyunjin,” he says, scratching under the tabby’s ear.

“I am not every cat you see,” the soft voice answers from behind him. It merges with the wind. “Not in this world, at the very least.”

Jungkook smiles. The tabby struggles out of his grip when she comes to stand next to him and he opens his arms to let it free. It scurries out of the balcony and into the hallway behind them, not before bowing down to Hyunjin, a privilege he doesn’t seem to get even as its tenant. It’s a cat thing, she’s told him before, and you are at best a hare.

They keep in silence for the most part, so it catches him off guard when Hyunjin suddenly raises her voice above the hum she had been keeping. “Are you afraid?” she asks.

Jungkook eyes the spot where the road meets the woods and sighs. “I shouldn’t be. They will be fine and they have Jinsoul and Chaewon with them. Yet I cannot help but worry.”

Human emotions make Hyunjin uneasy. They are too foreign for her to process, a pattern of meanings in a language she has not learned to read through. But she still wraps herself around him, butting her head under his chin as they look upon the fields, in a lousy yet heartfelt attempt to convey reassurance she doesn’t know how to express verbally. It warms his heart, even as she stares unblinkingly ahead, unsettling and inhumane. “It is only a month,” she speaks.

Jungkook pets her hair with gentle fingers, scratches under her ear. _That’s exactly why I’m afraid_ , he thinks. Too long and too short a time at once. It makes him feel precarious. “Time is of the strangest nature,” he says instead but she picks it up from his thoughts anyway. He is in the habit of hiding them even when he knows she’ll read through them.

“Are you afraid for _yourself_?” she asks.

“I’m in no danger,” he answers.

Hyunjin hums and it reverberates against him. “Aren’t you?” she says.

There are clouds overhead. It will rain soon. He hopes this means the sun has followed his sister, hopes because he doesn’t want to listen to the thudding of his heart, because he doesn’t want to think about it. “To be truthful… I’m just afraid of the wreckage I’d become,” he says, after a while. And then, quieter, “if I were to start, I wouldn’t know how to stop.”

“I don’t see why you’d _have_ to stop,” Hyunjin says, awfully earnest, and it reminds Jungkook again that she knows nothing of the human heart. 

“We would have to,” Jungkook sighs. “Human hearts are just fickle like that. Sooner, rather than later, he’d grow tired of my body and he has no want for my affection. I know by now how flighty things behave.”

Hyunjin considers this for a moment. “You are illiterate in the matters of the heart,” she concludes. “Surely, surely—“

“It is quite thoughtful of you to lie to me,” he interrupts, because he doesn’t want to listen to it any longer, smiling against the top of her head. Hyunjin struggles a bit in his arms and he remembers to keep his grip loose.

“You should spend more time with Chaewon,” she advices, dryly. “The both of you are the same sort of fool.”

“This is how you treat your elder?” he scoffs, pushing her away. Hyunjin lets herself get jostled and tightens her grip on him, a smile spreading on her face, thin and large. “Get off, I’ll tell Haseul not to feed you for a week. Go chase some mice.”

He forgets often she is barely a year older than his sister, despite all the lives she has lived and the time she spent frozen in company of Seokjin and Chaewon. But Hyunjin, like most cats, is playful when approached appropriately, and she plays along with Jungkook, chasing him across the balcony amidst laughter and the crackling of the approaching thunder.

“Hyunjin.”

Jungkook feels the breath in his throat hitch at the voice. Seokjin keeps sneaking on him. No matter what he does, Seokjin keeps sneaking on him with absolutely no warning, leaving him as cold as the first spray of a frozen shower. Hyunjin untangles from him languidly, off beat. The tension in the air seems not to affect her, as though it is only Jungkook who feels the pressure in his chest. He knows it not to be just him when he turns and Seokjin stares at the hand she rests on his shoulder, a tight set to his face that makes Jungkook feel a swoop in his stomach. It only grows as Seokjin flicks his eyes towards him, the same sharp gaze of ever.

“Yes, master,” Hyunjin answers calmly, hiding a smile.

Seokjin glances at her briefly, as though he had forgotten why he’d called out her name. “I… I need you to fetch Haseul for me.”

Hyunjin hums. “Is she at Lip—forgive me, Jungeun’s house?”

“I don’t know,” he confesses, puzzled. “I haven’t searched yet.”

“That’s alright,” she says, condescendingly, and steps away from them. The hallway is much darker, so Jungkook cannot see her face anymore, and neither can Seokjin, for that matter. “That’s what I’m here for. I’ll get going.”

Jungkook doesn’t hear the padding of feet when she leaves but he does see the flicker of a black tail, stark against the red curtains. Seokjin still stands against the frame of the window doors, staring and Jungkook’s heartbeat echoes in the silence that follows Hyunjin’s departure. The air between them crackles as though there was a storm incoming and Jungkook licks his lips in anxiety. Seokjin’s eyes follow the movement and stay there for just a second too long, his presence looming over Jungkook in a way that sends a chill down his spine.

“I…” Seokjin parts his lips, and Jungkook holds his breath. He waits for the step that Seokjin hovers over taking but it never comes. “I shall get going as well.”

He turns and leaves and Jungkook follows the retreating figure into the darkness of the castle with his eyes, collapsing against the railing when the echo of his steps finally gets lost.

 

 **v**.

Jungkook discovered the cat spoke an hour into the largest feast he had ever been part of.

It had kept quiet up until then, walking behind him and giving the stink eye to anything that spent too long watching Jungkook and there were many, many things looking at him. He trailed behind Tam Lin and Go Won as quietly as he could so as to not draw too much attention to himself but it was a hard feat to accomplish. Not only was he clearly a novelty, the siblings were… breathtakingly enchanting, as much as it pained him to say.

Go Won had changed her dress into a marvel of feathers on a bodice and a skirt of thin, pleated and almost transparent petals that bunched up into the shape of a rose when she sat on the bed to paint Jungkook’s face. Her eyelids were already glimmering in pink and starlight and the candlelight caught onto the long, intricate earrings she was wearing. What had intrigued Jungkook the most were the dried flowers swirling in her cheeks and she had answered, when he asked why they had to wear them, that it was their family’s signifier and as long as he was with them, he’d have to bear the sign as well. That was why his hair had been changed too, a bright pink that had surprised him when he’d come across a mirror.

Tam Lin had the flowers too, but his extended beyond his cheeks, across his neck and down the rest of his chest. Jungkook caught glimpses of them between the lace chemise that covered the expanse of his torso. He, too, wore the same stringy feathers than Go Won, but they curled downward from his shoulders to his arms, wing-like, and in turn made an ocean of his back. It was the only thing Jungkook could stare at as they entered a grand hall, carved into the inside of the largest tree he had ever seen in his life.

Much like the inside of Tam Lin and Go Won’s house, everything here wrapped into itself, as though it had been grown and not cut into being. There were large stairs at the sides, spilling from a door adorned with floating candles, framing what had to be simply the largest table in all of the known world. The abundance of it made Jungkook sick. It was filled to the brim with food, upon food: braised pork and wild boar, sugared flowers carefully arranged into bouquets, deer served in several sauces, an assortment of cakes and pastries decorated in colours he had never been able to perceive, and fruit upon fruit tucked in the empty spaces. That was to the extent that Jungkook could see, and he figured there was even more variety there where his eyes lost sharpness.

Jungkook observed the lavish interior as Tam Lin and Go Won made their rounds around the room. The decadence of it was enough that even the King’s palace, which Jungkook had seen only once when he and Yerim had been introduced into society, paled in comparison. Willow leaves hung from the top of the roof, coated in silver and gold that dripped shimmering sparkles of light into the crowds. And what a crowd it was. Jungkook trailed behind the siblings and watched them greet beings he had only seen depicted in old legends, arm in arm and smiling as they talked to minotaurs, speckled owls larger than a wardrobe, men half goat or half horse,  dwarves of the kind you only see in big cities and no less than an horde of other talking animals. The naiads were especially interested in him, crowding him into a corner and pulling at his limbs with their wet hands until Tam Lin caught wind of what was happening and stepped in.

Since then, Hyunjin had kept at his heel, eyeing everyone nearby at Tam Lin’s command. But then, the soft music in the background, played by a band of swamp dwellers, had been spurred into a grandiose spike and of that door atop the stairs that framed the moon so delicately had descended a tall and poised woman of a beauty so sharp it made Jungkook feel uneasy. Everything about her was _simple_ —her dress, her hair, her demeanour—but he would be wrong, and he was not too far off to suspect possibly dead, if he said it was plain. The sheer simplicity of her appearance, evidently carefully constructed to highlight her natural beauty, was a stark contrast to the rest of the room and everybody in it, which only made her presence more drawing, more intriguing. Everything looked gaudy in contrast.

Behind her were two girls the antinomy of each other, one bright and cherry haired, the other with raven hair and a disposition that did not seem to lend itself to socializing. By the sword and the chainmail carefully incorporated into her dress, he deemed the later to be the Queen’s champion. He didn’t know what to make of the other one, though by the enamoured look she sent the Queen, he had the beginning of an idea.

There wasn’t much time to consider it, though, because Hyunjin had jumped into his shoulder, startling him from his reverie, and shoved his head down with a paw. He had not realized everybody else was paying their respects and he was the only fool gaping.

“Bow down your head,” she hissed in his ear, whiskers tickling his cheek. He would’ve stayed down out of sheer surprise, even if her claws weren’t digging at his shoulder painfully.

When the Queen approached the centre of the room, where they lounged in silence, heads bowed respectfully, Tam Lin stepped outside the crowd. Jungkook only saw the shadow of his host obscuring the floor in front of him and couldn’t see the queen, but he did hear the elegant chuckle she gave and the way the clacking of her pointed shoes against stopped in their vicinity.

“Aren’t you too eager, Seokjin?” she asked, voice dripping honey. Jungkook frowned.

“Your majesty,” Tam Lin said, a note of annoyance underlining his speech.

“Ah, right, you don’t go by that name anymore,” she said, and it sounded slightly mocking to Jungkook’s ears. “I tend to forget.”

“Time is nothing to her majesty’s unbreakable mind, Tam Lin,” Go Won’s soft voice rose. Jungkook saw her ankles when she curtsied. The queen greeted her in much the same tone and then an additional voice, high and cheery, added its regards. He assumed it was the cherry girl.

Jungkook tried to sneak a look, peering up Tam Lin’s shoulder. Hyunjin’s claws dug further into the skin of his shoulder, sharp enough he feared she’d drawn blood, but it was too late—the queen had spotted him. She pushed Tam Lin gently aside to get a better look at him and Jungkook could only see her golden shoes peaking under her gown because Hyunjin had shoved his head back down. They matched his.

“Lift your head,” she instructed, and he did. She observed him for a moment, her lips forming a small o as her eyes swept over him. Though she was shorter than him, her presence was so large that he felt diminutive in front of her, and he was well aware that the thousands of eyes set on them contributed to the feeling. Her nails scrapped under his chin, sharp and painted red, when she lifted his face and turned it to the side, humming appreciatively.

“I like it,” she announced, turning to Tam Lin. The faerie was visibly simmering, though his anger subdued when she turned her eyes on him. “Is it mine?”

Jungkook bristled and opened his mouth to complain that no child born past the line of the western mountains was a belonging, much less to a _faerie_ queen, when Tam Lin and the queen’s eyes turned to him, one warning and the other frightening, and shut him up.

“As you can see,” Tam Lin spoke, gifting the queen a radiant smile. “I would never offend your majesty with such a crude gift. No,” he said, stepping again to obscure Jungkook from her view. “He is mine.”

The queen’s smile curled to the side. She lifted her hand and caressed Tam Lin’s cheek with the same sharp nails she had used to manhandle Jungkook, but the gesture was so gentle, the touch of a past lover. Her thumb even brushed over Tam Lin’s bottom lip and Jungkook only looked away to catch the cherry haired girl’s reaction, a downwards look and a small pout. He could see plainly enough that she was Tam Lin’s replacement, but he had an overwhelming curiosity to find out how that had come to be. He couldn’t possibly imagine who would have thrown Tam Lin out of their bed.

“You are still so bold, my love,” the queen said.

“I only grow stronger in your majesty’s presence,” Tam Lin replied, bowing his head.

“Is that so?” she mused, smiling softly. “Tomorrow you might not be by my side.”

Tam Lin fixed her with a look. Go Won’s fingers were tight around his elbow, white at the knuckles, but he still continued, daringly, “Then I hope this night never ends.”

“Likewise,” the queen said, lips stretching over a smile that was both sharp and delicate. Jungkook was still glowering at her despite every instinct telling him not to—he was too ignorant to feel fear and he took advantage of it. He didn’t care for Tam Lin, not at all, but he could recognize an unfair situation when it was happening in front of him and know which side he was supposed to side with.

“Queen Yves,” the girl with the jet black hair interrupted. The chainmail in her dress tingled in the silence when she stepped forward and her hand wrapped around the queen’s elbow. “We are to move if we expect to greet all of your guests tonight and start the feast on time.”

“Very well, Olivia,” the queen huffed and Olivia unwrapped her fingers off her arm, stepping back again with a stony expression. “I will keep an eye on you as always, Tam Lin. Go Won. Hyunjin…” she smiled and a chill went down Jungkook’s back. Tam Lin had moved again in front of him, to shield him, but even as they curtsied as their goodbyes, he could still feel the queen’s eyes on him. “See you around, child.”

 

 **xvii**.

Yerim’s absence makes everything feel like a prelude. Seokjin stares him down at dinner, lips wrapping around a mouthful of steak and Jungkook begs to be eaten, silently. Nothing has changed down the road—Yerim and the babe and their entourage have all disappeared and they are not coming back for at least a month, if not more—but there’s a noticeable shift in their dynamic.

Everyone can tell.

Everyone can tell but they can’t say anything. Father has left Seokjin in charge of the castle for the duration of his own voyage, which is longer than Yerim’s, and they must keep their ever present guests content. For the most part, they tend to scatter through the day, but they gather at dinner and Seokjin sits at Father’s seat under the scorn of the flimsy men that watch him with lousily disguised envy. Even if Father had not granted him authority over all of his knights, he would still outrank every single one of them. That was, only partly, why Father had forced him to marry Yerim in the first place: a son from the Golden Mines of the South, though far from home, was a prize too good to pass.

The knights eat and drink, they’re rowdy and loud, and they sing songs of maidens stolen by bears and ships crashing into far away shores. Seokjin observes, in dull amusement, with a hand on Jungkook’s knee and Jungkook feels cold sweat collect on the back of his neck. He keeps it there even when they retire to the studio and sit in front of the crackling fire. Jungkook’s heart beats against his ribcage, a disaster of emotions colluding inside him. How easy it must seem to Seokjin, so untouchable for the rest of them, to lay claim to whatever he desires.

But how could he ask him to stop, knowing that he doesn’t want him to.

“Say, Seokjin,” a knight starts. He’s drunk now, has been for a while, but a glass of ale still sloshes in his hand. “Aren’t your nights too lonely now? I would have left Jungkookie here in charge instead of letting such a treasure go.”

Seokjin fixes him with an unimpressed look. He’s bored and drawing circles on Jungkook’s knee. “She’s been gone a fortnight and she’ll be back in less,” he says.

“He mustn’t be using her well,” another one says. A few chorus their snickers. “What wouldn’t I do with such a beauty?”

“I rather think,” pips up another one, too sharp not to be purposeful, “that he’s got _someone_ else to relieve her. You were always good at handling a sword, weren’t you, Jungkookie?”

He leers at Jungkook and the rest of the knights fall into uncoordinated and rambunctious laughter. The sound grates on Jungkook’s ears and he wants to unsheathe the sword he’s left back in his room and slice all these puny men’s throats in rightful battle. It isn’t the first time he’s had such thoughts nor is it the last they’ll laugh like this so he bears it as he does every time. Father is too lenient with them, but he won’t be. So he waits. His hands clench over his pants and Seokjin takes one of them and squeezes it in his before standing up before them.

“That’s enough,” he says. “Leave.”

The knights pause, looking as surprised as Jungkook feels. The first one that spoke laughs awkwardly, unsurely, as though he thinks he can salvage a situation by turning it into a joke. “Oh, c’mon, Seokjin,” he says, bringing his glass up as if he’s toasting. “We weren’t serious.”

“I didn’t ask if you were serious,” Seokjin replies. “I _said_ , leave.”

“What, so now we can’t _talk_?” says the knight who had leered at Jungkook. He seems especially upset.

“Of course you can talk,” Seokjin says. “In the comfort of your own homes. Not mine.”

“You can’t do this,” the knight glowers. “You are nobody’s lord! We have sworn no fealty to you!”

“I think you will find,” Seokjin says, and it echoes off the walls in the silence. He regards the knight in the same way Jungkook’s seen him look at a bug before he steps on it, not unlike the way he looked at him, back at the well, “that I will do what I please. These are my grounds for the moment. Your lord isn’t here. Take your matters to him when he returns.” He straightens. “As for the rest of you, I don’t want to see you around until you have news of your lord coming back. Go back to your homes. Pay attention to the land we have given you.”

“Or what?” The knight says, still resolutely sitting down. The rest of them have moved towards the door and he hasn’t realized he’s alone. As far as strategy goes, the battlefield would have him dead within a day. Before that even, if somebody like Jungkook had less restraints to hold him back.

Seokjin snorts. “Aren’t you _afraid_ of me?” he asks, and his eyes glimmer dangerously as he steps near the knight, caging him against the very same place he refused to leave. “I’ve heard you talk about me, Jinyoung. You’re too stupid to be this brave. I have seen things you couldn’t imagine. I have spent more years in the fae realm than you have been _alive_. It is true. And don’t you wonder? Don’t you wonder if all that time changed anything?”

“Abomination,” the knight spits, but his eyes are bright with fear. “Heathen.”

“Perhaps,” Seokjin says, straightening up. “But you wouldn’t like to find out. Now scram.”

The men file out of the room and out of the estate and Jungkook stays still until the sound of their galloping is lost in the far silence of the night. He hopes at least one falls off their horse and gets trampled. It’s an ugly thought but it makes the icky feeling that’s spread inside him ever since they opened their mouths recede just a little bit.

Seokjin is at his side in a moment, similarly unsettled. The moonlight that streams through the window hits his face where he’s kneeling and his jet black hair doesn’t gleam any longer. It’s a stark reminder of how things have changed for them all. His hand rests again on Jungkook’s knee, the heat of his palm seeping through the fabric of his breeches and anchoring him outside his mind.

“Are you alright?” he asks.

Unsure, Jungkook nods. Seokjin looks at him for just a moment longer before nodding himself and standing up. He squeezes Jungkook’s shoulder as a goodbye and his hand trails off his back, lingering too long, when he moves towards the door, intent of leaving. But Jungkook couldn’t let him go just yet. And that seemed to have become, gradually, surreptitiously, with no regard towards their situations, the cornerstone of their relationship. Seokjin had pushed out of nowhere and Jungkook had gotten hooked sometime along the way and now he couldn’t let go.

“Seokjin,” Jungkook calls out, quietly enough that he might miss it.

He doesn’t. He never does. “Yes?” Seokjin says, without turning.

“We’ll be alone now,” he says, and in the night, it feels like a confession.

The fingers that rest on the frame of the door turn a bit whiter as Seokjin clutches, hovering over a step he doesn’t know how to take. Jungkook’s heart has resumed its pounding. It’s a few long, excruciating minutes before he speaks again.

“I know,” Seokjin answers, and leaves.

 

 **vi**.

The time of the faeries was more profound than that of humans. As if Tam Lin’s wishes had been granted by the moonlight illuminating all known worlds, the night stretched eternal under Jungkook’s feet. He laughed and ate and took Go Won out for a few dances because he would perish in his own boredom if he was not allowed to move. He did it under the gaze of Tam Lin and the Queen, both sharp like sword and dagger pointed at the centre of his back, though he did his hardest not to mind it. He never strayed too far, not after the time Tam Lin had to swoop in to save him from a murder of ravens that had cornered him to pick his eyes out. They had thought the sparkles dancing inside them were silver and gold speckles.

Jungkook’s head swirled, fuzzy and heady with everything he had enjoyed. The drinks were similar, yet ultimately different, from every ale he had been given at his father’s estate and not at all like the sour drinks given out to guests at the King’s court. He felt too sharp, too lucid in the aftermath, as though the drink were supposed to fish him out of a slumber rather than induce it. In the faerie court, he figured this was not as surprising. Sometimes complete awareness could be more numbing than the slipping of one’s mind. Regardless, he had drunk more off the pretty lights showering him from the sky than he had from the nectar they served at the feast table.

Silently, the woods had crawled out of the queen’s palace, until only the strongest of her court remained at her side. Jiwoo, who Tam Lin refused to call by the name she had chosen, still hung from the queen’s arm, feeding her strawberries so large and red that the queen’s lips wrapped around them in a way that made pink seep to her cheeks. She was transparent as ever, Tam Lin had sneered and Jungkook wondered if there had been a time where he was the one doing the feeding, if, by any chance, the queen’s lips had ever brought a blush like that to his own face.

The night had made him sympathize to Tam Lin’s plight. Now, albeit reluctantly, he could understand Yerim’s motivations, though he couldn’t forgive his actions, not just yet. Go Won had whispered softly, when the queen had taken a deer woman’s hand and spun her around on the dance floor, the events that would inevitably transpire the coming night. Her voice carried sorrow and grief begun festering ages ago and he could not help but look upon Tam Lin and mirror a fraction of it, though the man clearly disliked the pity in his eyes. Every reminder of his fate—and they were constant, as though he was being taunted—seemed to annoy him more as the night went on and Jungkook watched him grab a jug of jasmine wine and finish it by himself with no more rosiness to his cheeks than when he had started.

When the last of Tam Lin’s inferiors had left the party (this, too, included Hyunjin and Go Won, who had gathered their possessions and vacated the castle just a few moments ago), he rose from his hollowed seat and motioned for Jungkook to follow. The queen was nowhere to be seen. Jungkook trailed behind him, still contemplating the marvel of beauty the palace had been turned into. He did not want to leave, but he supposed that was the point.

They were at the front gates, spikes just barely poking their heads out from the roof of a large arching root, when Tam Lin stopped in his tracks and took two steps back, colliding into Jungkook. He whirled around, a hurried look on his eyes, and took him by the wrist, fingers tight around the bone. Inspecting the grounds with no regard to the way fear hammered the blood of Jungkook’s veins against his ears, he shoved him into a small hallway just before the open gates. There, he caged Jungkook between the wall and his body, hands pressed at the sides of his head and a knee shoving his legs apart. He was looking all like a man fiercely drunk in love and just a little scary.

“What are you _doing_?” Jungkook hissed, the heavy scent of Tam Lin’s drink seeping through the air between them.

“She’s trying to take you from me,” Tam Lin explained, nosing at the juncture of Jungkook’s neck and shoulder. Jungkook tried not to shiver under the touch. His nose was cold. On the floor, Jungkook noticed for the first time a snake of vines slithering through their tangled legs, its back covered in bright green moss. It looked up at them, black eyes gleaming in the dim firelight of the hallway, and Jungkook was certain it could take his life in an instant.

“What?” Jungkook panicked. He couldn’t afford to live a thousand years in a dream. “What do you mean?”

Tam Lin’s hand settled in the middle of Jungkook’s chest, where his rapid heart beat madly against his ribcage. “Settle down,” he muttered, pressing a wet kiss to the side of Jungkook’s jaw. His heart was deaf to all commands. “You have to play along. The faerie trade in given freedoms and half-truths. They know nothing of love and decency, but they do know about desire. You’re mine for now, Jungkook.”

The snake coiled next to his left ankle, in wait. Its eyes were too smart and too vicious and the certainty of its purpose inundated Jungkook with a fear too vibrant, too paralyzing. Everything _felt_ too much all of sudden and he couldn’t but search with frenzied eyes a familiar sight, gasp out in a hush the shape of Tam Lin’s forbidden name, the one he’d heard Yerim call out in the meadow earlier, ages ago.

The snake started moving. “Seokjin,” he rasped, afraid.

Tam Lin stilled for the briefest of moments and then he was looking down at Jungkook, gaze piercing through the cloud of his brain. His hands cupped the sides of Jungkook’s face, thumbs slotting under his jaw with a strength and conviction that helped ground him just a little more, coax him into a world where he was not suddenly lonely. “Jungkook,” he said seriously, pressing gently over the dried flowers on his cheeks. “Listen to me. She cannot take you from me. You are mine. You belong to me. I have taken you for my pleasure only. We don’t steal from each other in the land of the fae. You are _mine_.”

“Only yours,” Jungkook repeated, like a mantra. Tam Lin’s hands digging at his face, the length of his body pressing him against the cold rock of the hallway wall, his sharp gaze boring into Jungkook’s were the only things that tied him to the world, even as the snake sank its teeth into the soft flesh above Jungkook’s ankle.

Tam Lin’s thumb brushed over Jungkook’s lower lip, altogether too tenderly for the heat and pain extending inside him, and he abruptly dipped down to capture that which he had touched. Jungkook would’ve dropped to the ground if Tam Lin hadn’t caught him by the waist, pressing him against the wall even harder. The grip he had on the soft flesh of Jungkook’s middle would surely leave a mark to hide away, to poke at later.

Jungkook unravelled himself under Tam Lin’s touch, a boneless thing melting against the anchor of his lips. Trembling as Tam Lin licked into his mouth, the searing hot of his blood making him dizzy. Tam Lin was drinking off the venom that the snake was injecting on Jungkook’s body before it had any effect, but he kissed him again and again, even after the green villain slithered into the darkness of the hallways and the bitter of Jungkook’s mouth turned into the sweet of the apples he had been savouring earlier. He couldn’t seem to stop and Jungkook, fingers curling at his hip, didn’t think of questioning it. Tam Lin’s lips were dripping black when he first drew away, the hissing of the snake echoing away from them, and a raw pink by the last time he kissed him, as they walked away into the end of an endless night.

Neither spoke of it on the way back to the well.

 

 **xiv**.

“Am I dreaming again?”

Seokjin’s hands are under his shirt. His fingers grip at Jungkook’s sides, the lows and highs of his skin. His lips trail all over, leaving red marks, leaving the skin it touches warm. He drinks from Jungkook’s mouth, his jaw, his neck. He’s cornered Jungkook in the middle of a hallway, made him drop his candleholder and the dirt of the floor snuffed out the flame so that only the moon remained to account for their treachery. Seokjin is still fully clothed—it is one of the nights where he stays on Father’s studio, pouring over numbers that never make sense, wrangling with them until they do—but Jungkook is on his night gown and robes. It is extremely unfair.

“I don’t know,” Seokjin mouths against his neck. He bites down and it stings for just a minute before he kisses it better. “Do you dream of me often?”

Jungkook does. It hasn’t gotten any better as the figure of Seokjin shifts from the fog of mystery into the clarity of a human being, as the days pass and they grow closer. If anything, it’s gotten worse, because now not only do his dreams locate themselves into whatever pictures of the faerie world haven’t faded out of Jungkook’s mind, but they’ve taken the scenarios of places they traverse continuously, in broad daylight. It makes it all the more dangerous.

He finds himself recalling Seokjin’s touch even as he has him sitting in front of him, brows pressed tight on his forehead and ink stained fingers going over scarcely dried paper to the backdrop of the castle’s library. And it’s shameful that all Jungkook can do is clench his fists at his sides so he doesn’t reach out to touch him on the irreversible mistake of a passion running high equivocally. Sometimes, when he feels restless, he will pass by Seokjin and allow himself just to draw his hand across the low of his back, make it seem an accident, nothing noteworthy, while the tips of his finger tingle well into the setting sun.

He dreams of drinking off him under the moonlight, under the sun; out in the open so his claim is well acknowledged by all the set their eyes on them; or inside, enclosed the both of them so that only he is privy to the wonders of his body. It’s a problem, at this point, how much he just wants to drop to his knees in front of Seokjin and drown himself in the taste of his skin.

(And the dreams—the dreams that are worst of all, that make him wake in a cold sweat, with a pounding heart, and a lousy excuse for the pressure in his chest that he knows to be guilt, are the dreams where nothing happens. Where they lay together, stealing kisses from each other in between soft laughter and the steady river of conversation, as Hyunjin chases the babe around the gardens and the twinkling giggles of their sisters can be heard afar, happy).

Seokjin’s hands settle against the small of his back and Jungkook arches against him, pressing close, closer, drinking off the groan Seokjin lets out. This wall, too, is cold in the middle of the night, a night that is finite. _We have no time to waste_ , he thinks.

“Seokjin,” he calls, kissing Seokjin. Seokjin kisses like he’s about to ravish him, like he knows too much about Jungkook already, like he can show him all of that. “Seokjin, touch me.”

“Where?” Seokjin says, running a hand over Jungkook’s thigh. How thrilling, how fast his heart beats. His excitement settles low in his stomach, pooling like molten gold.

“Anywhere,” he answers, brushing against Seokjin again. His breath leaves him when Seokjin finds him in the dark, already hard, and strokes slow and painful. “Everywhere.”

Jungkook wakes up in his bed and dawn’s breaking its colours over the horizon. The candle by his bedside is dirty and snuffed. He doesn’t know what to think.

 

 **vii**.

Yerim held onto Tam Lin with an iron grip, even as he turned into a number of beasts in her arms, each one uglier and more vicious than the last. The wind made her green mantle flap against her skirt and Jungkook could see from afar how her legs were trembling, not only from the weight and the cold but from the fear she surely must be feeling. Still, she held onto Tam Lin and did not look down from the vicious stare of the Queen, sitting atop her black horse. The wind still carried the jingles from Tam Lin’s now abandoned white horse, an acute twinkle adding a layer of chill to the evening.

Jungkook wanted to go. He wanted to grab his sister and ride away from Miles Cross as fast as possible, but a flicker of Hyunjin’s tail reminded him making an appearance would be disastrous. The Queen would just as easy take one for the other and then he would be the one sent to hell as tithe. They had been already successful smuggling out Chaewon from the trooping party, so that she lay fast asleep on Jungkook’s arms.

Yet he couldn’t stand the sight of Yerim trembling as the lion in her arms made the motion to bite her neck. He didn’t know how long it had been since she had pulled Tam Lin from his white mount but time warped around all faeries and to Jungkook, it seemed as though thousands of years had gone by in a second. Then Tam Lin turned into a smouldering coal and Yerim threw him into the well, where it sizzled out against the cold water and finally, finally transformed into the man they all remembered so well.

Tam Lin rose from the well and Jungkook averted his eyes, for the man was naked (and it was a man at last), and Yerim wrapped him in her green mantle, obscuring him from the Queen’s eyes.

“Curse you, Tam Lin,” bellowed the Queen, gripping tight her mount. “I should have turned your eyes to glass and your heart to stone so you would not dare betray me! You ought to die in shame, child,” she spat against Yerim. Bravely, his sister held her own. “I will see to it myself if possible!”

“Not while I’m alive, witch,” spoke Tam Lin, still covered. He had wrapped his arms around a shivering Yerim, shielded her from whatever the trooping fairies may do. “Begone. You have lost me.”

With a final angry shout, the Queen moved her horse towards the path to hell and the entourage, half angry, half amazed, followed behind her. The four of them stayed with their eyes set on the path and alert for any treason that should follow but soon the galloping of the horses lost itself in the brutal heart of the woods. “I think they are finally gone,” Jungkook announced.

Tam Lin collapsed.

“Seokjin!” Yerim called out, catching Tam Lin in her arms. Hyunjin hopped off the horse, shifted into her human form and scooped Chaewon out of Jungkook’s arms so he could give aid to his sister.  Jungkook jumped off his mount as well and made way amongst the weeds towards where Yerim had laid Tam Lin—rather, Seokjin, in her lap. Black hair flopped over his eyes and pink rapidly rose to the surface of his skin where the wind lashed at it but he was out like a light, noticeably exhausted. “I think he’s fallen asleep,” Yerim noted when Jungkook approached.

“He has good reasons to,” Jungkook said, wrapping his own cloak around Yerim’s shoulders. “Give him to me. You will ride with Chaewon and Hyunjin on my horse.”

Yerim whipped her head towards him, surprised. “What?”

“It will be safer this way,” he explained, wrapping an arm under Seokjin’s sleeping form. Yerim fastened her green mantle over his body, covering the most. “We have a long way to ride tonight. I cannot trust you won’t fall asleep either and I don’t want your horse to trample you to death. Hyunjin will take care of you.”

Yerim hesitated. She was still looking at the man asleep on Jungkook’s arms. She raised a hand to his face, gently wiped the dirt from his brow. Jungkook looked away, before anything ugly could settle inside him. She wrapped the cloak around her middle, so as to not chill the babe inside her, and nodded.

By the time Seokjin first stirred, cradled on Jungkook’s chest, dawn was already streaking colour into the horizon. Oakwood tower wasn’t awfully far away. As he had predicted, Yerim had fallen asleep, cradling Chaewon herself, and Hyunjin was holding them both as she rode his stallion, just a little ahead from them.

“You’ll spook the mare if you move too much,” Jungkook whispered. It was too early to be louder.

Seokjin didn’t open his eyes. “I didn’t think it would be your arms I would wake up to.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Jungkook drawled.

“I never said you did,” Seokjin said, burrowing his nose into Jungkook’s chest, exhausted. There was a strange tremor on Jungkook’s hands now, a sort of nervousness that hadn’t been there before. It was disquieting to hold him, suddenly aware of every place where their bodies met. But he wasn’t about to let him down. He was not so cruel.

“I just hope you won’t bring the same trouble home,” he said, to distract himself. It was a poor excuse of a chastisement.

He felt Seokjin’s smile curling against his chest and he could conjure it in his mind. Here was a question to consider for days to come: could a devious man ever stop being devious? “I guess we’ll have to see.”

 

 **xv**.

“Why won’t you let yourself fall in love?”

Yerim’s voice is delicate when she’s serious. Oftentimes, the only thing Seokjin will hear of her is the shrieking of her laughter as she runs around the gardens, chasing Hyunjin or their child, both abominating in their otherness but dearly loved all the same. He’s planted her a garden full of roses right under his window so that he may see them bask in the sun during the times he must stay inside to work on building them all lives beyond Carterhaugh. It mingles, bright and loud, with his sister’s gentle rasp, and it becomes a song to assuage his growing fears, to make his days more bearable.

But when she’s serious, it comes out like a whistle, carried off by the wind as gently as it does the fractured petals of the dandelions. The sharp highs of her speech round out into curving slopes, like the mountains where they hide themselves from the rest of the world, and the lows get onto even ground. He’s been meaning to teach her how to play the flute because it reminds him of her voice.

“Say, do you miss the coloured dew from Carterhaugh at dawn?” He asks instead, raising his hand above where they lie, mimicking the motions he used to suspend in the air the water droplets that gathered around them during the night so that they would catch onto the dim morning light and shower them in colours. “Stained glass is just not the same.”

Yerim rolls onto her stomach, gathers herself up in her elbows and looks down at him with a funny face. “You’re a coward, Kim Seokjin,” she says crudely.

He buries his face in the crook of his elbow, feigning annoyance at the sun shining down on them. It’s well after noon but the brunt of it hasn’t gone down yet. “Well, then, why do you ask questions if you already know the answers?”

Yerim huffs, unsatisfied. “How can one be afraid of loving?”

“I’m not afraid of love,” Seokjin says, peering up at her. “I love you. I love Chaewon. I love our child.”

Yerim pushes ahead, despite the warmth colouring her cheeks. She is still a little shy for him. She was like this too, back at Carterhaugh. “And my brother?”

Seokjin hums under his breath, low and mellow. “Your brother doesn’t want my love yet. He, too, is afraid.”

“That shouldn’t be a reason,” Yerim insists, though her tone isn’t quite as harsh anymore.

“Sometimes things just are, my cherry angel,” Seokjin sighs, reaching out to brush the bangs off her face. “No matter how much you want them to not be.”

 

 **ix**.

“I had a dream last night,” Seokjin noted in a hushed whisper. There was a flurry of movement all around the castle, the servants going about in frenzy. The kitchens were particularly bustling, pig stew simmering and freshly baked bread being laid to cool and barrels upon barrels of wine being carried from the caves to the outside. In the gardens, which were really just a large expanse of grass and wet soil, Jungkook was alerted to the chiming of the bells, clamouring for their attendance.

He was Seokjin’s best man. “Is that so?” he muttered back dryly, stepping forward to straighten the wedding robes, a lavish and silky blue and red. “What did you dream of?”

A hand snaked from the large opening of the white sleeves, catching Jungkook’s wrist in between long, slender fingers that pulled him forward until he was colliding with Seokjin’s chest. Eyelashes fanning over his cheeks, Seokjin peered at him. “I dreamt of you,” he said, eyes still so sharp, gaze so peculiar. He had been subjected to that very same look a long time ago, in a dim hallway. “Under a canopy of trees and roses. All the way back at Carterhaugh.”

Jungkook’s heart thudded in his chest. He tried to will it away, tried to harden his own features even though he could feel his blood pounding against the skin of Seokjin’s fingers. Jungkook licked his lips and saw the eyes trace the movement. “You are mad,” he hissed angrily, eyeing the entrance. Though they’d been left alone, the door was still askew.

Seokjin smiled, bright and broad and ultimately unconcerned. “Perhaps,” he said. His thumb rushed a gentle pattern on Jungkook’s wrist. “Is it mad to want something of your own?”

“It is when what you want is _me_ ,” Jungkook retorted harshly. If the crescendo of his heart didn’t slow, it would soon be the only thing he heard.

The man tilted his head to regard him with careful attention. Under his gaze, Jungkook felt himself an unbind book, spilling unacknowledged secrets out of hastily prepared seams. He cursed the thread of the librarian that had sewn him, for if he had made a better job, he would not be falling apart so easily under the weight of Seokjin’s unabashed scrutiny. “Are you afraid of me?” Seokjin asked lastly, voice raw and tender and not without a little sadness.

Caught unaware, Jungkook went lax under his grip. Puzzled, he regarded Seokjin as the man had regarded him. Even under all the gold and the makeup, an attempt to make him ugly though he could never be anything less than wondrous, so unlike the shower of flowers he remembered, Seokjin looked back at him unveiled. “No,” Jungkook confessed, knot in his throat.

Seokjin smiled again, softer this time, leaning forward. And the door that had been askew was pushed open.

“My lords,” the maid Haseul called out sweetly. She was carrying a black cat that coiled its swinging tail around her wrist. Its eyes were yellow and judging. “They expect you both downstairs, if you are finished dressing.”

“I’ll accompany you downstairs myself, Haseul,” Jungkook said, stepping away from the grip. His hands were shaking.

For the first time of many, Seokjin let him go.

 

 **xviii**.

When Jungkook runs out of patience, they seem to have reached an impasse.

Alone, they have grown closer and further apart. Seokjin dines with him every night, smiles at him over the candlelight, entertains his desires for roaming around the grounds and makes him listen to the silly jests he so enjoys. Everywhere they can go, they go, never a step too far from each other. And as much as Seokjin listens, he also _speaks_ , which is to Jungkook unprecedented. He learns so much of him, pieces of information scattered across larger conversations about things bigger than themselves that Jungkook files away, keeps close to his heart. How their mother used to look like, long black hair growing to her knees. The books that he had kept under his bed when he was younger. The plays he’d put on for his parents and their guests, dragging a shy Chaewon into the room dressed like dragons he would slay and princesses he would rescue. He also tells him stories of real dragons, of the sorts that hid in the mountains to keep from being slain, under the protection of another court of beings. Stories of fauns and deer and dwarves and faeries, always faeries, trading in a life for another.

Once, Jungkook had said, after a particularly incredible story, _I think we speak different languages_ , and Seokjin had put his hand on his knee, as if to say there was at least one they shared. Jungkook’s heart had fluttered in silence, and the moment had passed.

And the thing is: they keep on passing. All those moments when they are so near each other it seems impossible to draw away, somehow Seokjin seems to find the strength to do so. Every time Jungkook will turn to find him standing too close, a steadfast hand in places that have become not so uncharacteristic for him to place a hand on but that Jungkook would hardly ever allow any other to touch, he will lean away and comment on the moon or the meat or something that Jungkook could not care less about. The breath that Jungkook holds then will rush out of him and the disappointment will fill in the spaces all that air has left empty. It’s frustrating, it’s disappointing, and it’s awful, awfully—

“—maddening! It’s just maddening,” he laments.

“Then why not do something about it yourself?” Jungeun proposes over Haseul’s chastisements, one evening he’s been invited to Haseul’s cottage on the far end of the estate to have tea. They don’t live together yet, they are still too young to marry. Haseul has not worked long enough. Yet, signs of Jungeun populate the surfaces of the quaint home, from piles of books Haseul couldn’t read on her own to packs of mint tea that he knows she dislikes.

Jungkook blinks. He’s taken no offense. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what Lord Kim is waiting for,” she responds honestly, nibbling on a freshly baked scone. She seems so nonchalant. “But it doesn’t seem too far off to think that the answer is you.”

Which is how he’s come to stand at the outside of Seokjin’s rooms, in the manner of a fool about to swallow his own heart. It is hardly the first time he has been here and yet his hand still trembles when he reaches out to knock. A soft allowance is spoken from the inside of the room and Jungkook turns the doorknob, quietly entering the room. Seokjin glances at him from atop his bed when he silently closes the door behind his back and pushes aside the papers he’d been holding.

There’s but a single candle lit atop the bookshelf near the window in addition to the distant crackling fire and it makes Seokjin’s shadow paint the figure a giant on the white of the flowing curtains when he moves off the bed and towards him. Jungkook feels smaller, all of sudden, but not any less brave.

“Why are you here?” Seokjin asks, running his hands over Jungkook’s arms. It is cold outside but that’s not why he shivers.

“I wanted to see you,” answers Jungkook honestly. The lock bolts behind them.

“There’s only one way this will end if you want to stay the night,” Seokjin warns.

Jungkook tilts his head. “Is it my worries you are trying to assuage or just your own?”

Seokjin smiles, small and familiar. Jungkook has learned to read him. His eyes reflect the fire of the candle burning away in its copper tray.

He says nothing as he lays Jungkook down on the bed but Jungkook reads it off his lips, and the tips of his fingers, and the clashing of their knees. He reads it off his smile, curving into the crooks of his own body, and the lingering taste of the venison they hunted just the day before on the roof on his mouth. It speaks to him in urgency; unaccustomed to losing it, it says, _we have wasted so much time_. And then, in the off-beat, in the moments of quiet, when even what is not uttered has an underlying secret, it says, _I have wanted for so long_ and Jungkook takes it for the promise it envelops.

Jungkook lies, sweat collecting at the back of his knees, and he gives and he gives and he gives.

 

 

 

 

(i.

 “Will you come see me again?” Seokjin asked, squeezing the delicate hand of the girl. She had listened so intently. He reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. Her heart was earnest. Seokjin couldn’t help but hope, however foolish hope was in a place like Carterhaugh. “Come morning?”

Yerim nodded, smiling. “At dawn, alone.”

“That’s it alright,” he beamed. Yerim waved him goodbye and stalked off to where the boy, her brother, looked upon them from the edge of the clearing. Tall and handsome and just as earnest, he worried over his sister even as she batted his hands away and laughed at his concern.  Only when she had disappeared at the edge of the forest did the boy turn, holding Seokjin’s gaze for a fraction of eternity until he, too, was gone.

“What will you do?” asked Chaewon, bringing the teacup to her lips.

Seokjin had told her everything.

“What do you mean?” he said, scooping Hyunjin into his arms. “I will talk to her, of course. If all goes well, she will help us. She is my last hope.”

The teacup tinkled against the place as Chaewon set it down. “I meant about the boy.”

From the reflection of the well, Seokjin had seen the hand that plucked the rose from the bush, rough knuckles and knobby fingers belonging to big eyes and large teeth and rosy cheeks. He tapped his fingers against the table and a small smile grew on his face. Chaewon scoffed.

“You want him for yourself, don’t you?” she accused, eyes narrowing.

Seokjin didn’t reply. The boy had taken his attention and he would, at least, be sure to get it back. After all, the magic told Seokjin to take as much as they would steal.)

**Author's Note:**

> this was... an experience. a journey, really. and im really glad it ended because i am so TIRED of LOOKING AT IT. (i bet u can tell where my patience runs off)
> 
> listen, i will the first one to admit that this fic is just plain odd. i wasn't _planning_ on it being odd, i was actually going for more of mystical and folk-tale like, a thing of magic and esoterica but... instead i got a weird semi-fantasy thing with two horny dudes boning each other in dreams. then again, i also wanted this thing to be _short_ and uncomplicated. this changed a lot from its original conception to whatever it is now, mostly because seokjin wouldn't stop bothering me about wanting to stick his dick on jungkook or something, and i couldn't help myself from writing about it. 
> 
> but really, i think im fond of it. it's hard to read but i am fiercely attached to the choices i made, the ones that matter at least. yerim and seokjin's relationship, though sadly not explored, is a very nice one. i like when people in marriages enjoy each other's company. i have much to say still. i think i would like to write the chaerrim counterpart, but i don't think anybody would be interested haha
> 
> what'd you think? did you like it? was it strange? what do you think is a dream and what isn't? let me know! you can message me on tumblr [@mallahanmoxie ](http://mallahanmoxie.tumblr.com/)or tweet at me [@jinsxing](https://twitter.com/jinsxing)


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